The United States military released video Monday of what it called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on the weekend, in which a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. vessel to slow to avoid a collision.
The incident occurred Saturday as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal were conducting a so-called “freedom of navigation” transit of the strait between Taiwan and mainland China.
This comes after the U.S. recently accused China of also performing an “unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” in the air, saying a Chinese J-16 fighter jet late last month flew directly in front of the nose of a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea.
The incident in the Taiwan Strait came on a day when both U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu were in Singapore for an annual defense conference.
At the same time, the assistant secretary of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs, Bill Russo, stopped in Honolulu en route to Fiji and New Zealand. The bureau's mission is, in part, to communicate U.S. foreign policy to American and foreign audiences.
Russo met with officials Saturday from the East-West Center and the University of Hawaiʻi. That followed a day-long briefing Friday with Indo-Pacific military officials at Camp Smith where Russo said he was struck by the physical presence of U.S. allies.
"I think I had more opportunity to speak to Aussies and Kiwis and Brits and French and Korean and Japanese allies who are there, embedded on the ground working side by side with American servicemembers than I would have expected. And so it was a really tangible, visible reflection of the importance of our alliances to all of the work that we are doing," he said Saturday.
"The other thing that really struck me was, you know, for all of the focus on the hard power, and for the big challenges that we face, a lot of the conversation that was happening was focused around humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, particularly looking at Guam in the wake of the cyclone," Russo added.
Russo said the federal government is currently working with Congress to find over $7 billion in funding for the Pacific region, particularly for the Compact of Free Association states of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau.
"Part of my job, part of the reason I'm here, part of the reason I'm speaking with you right now is to try and tell that story of the value that American diplomacy and the State Department can bring to the people of Hawaiʻi, even if it's not quite as, necessarily as present or real in people's everyday lives as they might know," Russo told HPR.
This interview aired on The Conversation on June 5, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
David Rising of The Associated Press contributed to this report.
